Luther Strange: Alabama prisons face 'tough choices'

Attorney General Luther Strange participating in a panel on prison overcrowding and criminal justice in Washington. Strange warned that Alabama and other states will face "tough choices" in dealing with their prisons. (George Altman, Washington Bureau)

While releasing some prisoners could ease beleaguered state budgets and prisons, Strange said, it would be politically unpopular and must be packaged with some stricter crime laws to gain support.

"We have a ... (prison) population that’s about 195 percent of the designed capacity, so we understand the problems," Strange said.

The attorney general spoke as part of a panel on prison overcrowding and criminal justice held by the Federalist Society, a conservative think tank.

He was joined by university professors, a former prosecutor and a federal appellate judge. The group spanned a wide ideological range but largely agreed on a few points: Some prisoner releases are likely inevitable across the country in coming years; they will be politically difficult; and the best way to release prisoners while minimizing the harm done to society is through use of statistics.

"You probably could release a third to a half of all the individuals in major prisons and make a cost-effective and public-safety-effective decision," said Richard Berk, a professor of criminology and statistics at the University of Pennsylvania.

"There are certain individuals you never want to see out there, but there are also a lot of individuals who are not a threat to public safety, for whom you’re paying thousands of dollars a year to incarcerate, and these days we can tell you which is which," he said.

Sarah Hart, a longtime Philadelphia prosecutor, recalled tracking a long list of inmates, released under a court order, who went on a collective crime spree in the year-and-a-half after they were freed.

"In that one, 18-month period, they ... were re-arrested for over 10,000 new crimes, including 79 murders," Hart said. "Even I, as a very cynical prosecutor, was absolutely blown away by that number."

Such concerns resonate across society and make even carefully thought-out prisoner releases a political albatross. Proposals that makes public officials appear tough on crime, by contrast, are a boon politically, even if they’re not effective, panelists said.

Three-strikes laws, which impose long prison sentences for repeat offenders, are much more likely to incarcerate criminals through their late 20s and 30s — not the teen years, when they are most likely to commit violent crimes, said Deborah Daniels, a former U.S. attorney now with an Indianapolis law firm.

"If you try to do anything that might approach this scientifically, and in any way appear to be releasing people or just not putting them in for long periods of time ... you get accused of being soft on crime," Daniels said.

One way around this problem, Strange said, is to package statistically based prisoner releases with mandates that death row inmates be put to death sooner, guarantees that those likely to re-offend will serve their full sentences, and other measures widely seen as tough on crime.

When states fail to shrink the populations of overcrowded prisons themselves, federal courts can take over the process — an outcome that few panelists favored.

"I — personally, philosophically, practically and every other way — would like for the state to solve its own problems ... rather than turn over the prison system to the Supreme Court of the United States to run," Strange said. "I know that that cannot end well."